You don't because each generation goes through the same learning experiences
over and over again. Apparently, reading history doesn't help.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2018 11:36 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Becoming Serfs
Grim stuff!
We can ignore it, but how will we ignore our lives in 20 years? (I'll only be
103). Remember the boys in Pinocchio? They frolicked and played even as they
began to turn into...Donkeys. And we are involved with all our fun
distractions even as we are turning into Serfs. How do I explain this to my
grandchildren?
Carl Jarvis
On 8/27/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Becoming Serfs
A 2016 demonstration in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy
Wall Street movement started five years earlier. (Corinne Segal /
pbs.org)
You know the statistics. Income inequality in the United States has
not been this pronounced in over a century. The top 10 percent has 50
percent of the country's income, and the upper 1 percent has 20
percent of the country's income. A quarter of American workers
struggle on wages of less than $10 an hour, putting them below the
poverty line, while the income of the average CEO of a major
corporation is more than 300 times the pay of his or her average
worker, a massive increase given that in the 1950s the average CEO
made 20 times what his or her worker made. This income inequality is
global.
The richest 1 percent of the world's population controls 40 percent of
the world's wealth. And it is getting worse.
What will the consequences of this inequality be economically and
politically? How much worse will it get with the imposition of
austerity programs and a new tax code that slashes rates for
corporations, allowing companies to hoard money or buy back their own
stock rather than invest in the economy? How will we endure as health
care insurance premiums steadily rise and social and public welfare
programs such as Medicaid, Pell Grants and food stamps are cut? And
under the tax code revision signed by President Trump in December,
rates will increase over the long term for the working class. Over the
next decade, the revision will cost the nation roughly $1.5 trillion.
Where will this end?
We live in a new feudalism. We have been stripped of political power.
Workers are trapped in menial jobs, forced into crippling debt and
paid stagnant or declining wages. Chronic poverty and exploitative
working conditions in many parts of the world, and increasingly in the
United States, replicate the hell endured by industrial workers at the
end of the 19th century. The complete capture of ruling institutions
by corporations and their oligarchic elites, including the two
dominant political parties, the courts and the press, means there is
no mechanism left by which we can reform the system or protect
ourselves from mounting abuse. We will revolt or become 21st-century
serfs, forced to live in misery and brutally oppressed by militarized
police and the most sophisticated security and surveillance system in
human history while the ruling oligarchs continue to wallow in unimagined
wealth and opulence.
"The new tax code is explosive excess," the economist Richard Wolff
said when we spoke in New York. "We've had 30 or 40 years where
corporations paid less taxes than they ever did. They made more money
than they ever did.
They
have been able to keep wages stagnant while the productivity of labor rose.
This is the last moment historically they need another big gift, let
alone at the expense of the very people whose wages have been
stagnant. To give them a tax bust of this sort, basically reducing
from 35 percent to 20 percent, is a 40 percent cut. This kind of crazy
excess reminds you of the [kings] of France before the French
Revolution when the level of excess reached an explosive social dimension.
That's where we are."
When capitalism collapsed in the 1930s, the response of the working
class was to form unions, strike and protest. The workers pitted power
against power. They forced the oligarchs to respond with the New Deal,
which created
12 million government-funded jobs, Social Security, the minimum wage
and unemployment compensation. The country's infrastructure was
modernized and maintained. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) alone
employed 300,000 workers to form and maintain national parks.
"The message of the organized working class was unequivocal," Wolff said.
"Either you help us through this Depression or there will be a revolution."
The New Deal programs were paid for by taxing the rich. Even in the
1950s, during the Eisenhower presidency, the top marginal rate was 91 percent.
The rich, enraged, mounted a war to undo these programs and restore
the social inequality that makes them wealthy at our expense. We have
come full circle. Dissidents, radicals and critics of capitalism are
once again branded as agents of foreign powers and purged from
universities and the airwaves. The labor movement has been dismantled,
including through so-called right-to-work laws that prohibit
agreements between unions and employers. The last remaining
regulations to thwart corporate pillage and pollution are removed.
Although government is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves
from predatory oligarchs and corporations, the rich tell us that
government is the problem, not the solution. Austerity and a bloated
and out-of-control military budget, along with the privatization of
public services and institutions such as utilities and public
education, we are assured, are the way to economic growth. And
presiding over this assault and unchecked kleptocracy are the con
artist in chief and his billionaire friends from the fossil fuel and
war industries and elsewhere on Wall Street.
The elites cook statistics to lie about a recovery from the 2008
global financial crash. To gather unemployment statistics, for
example, government agents ask people two questions: Are you working?
If they answer "yes" they are counted as employed even if they have a
temporary job in which they work only an hour a week. If they say "no"
they are asked if they have been looking for work. If they have not
looked for work in the last four weeks they are magically erased from
the unemployment rolls. And then there is the long list of those not
counted as unemployed, such as prisoners, the retired, stay-at-home
spouses and high school and college students who want jobs.
Alternative facts did not begin with Donald Trump.
"You don't have to be a statistical genius to understand that over the
last
10 years, a significant number of people gave up looking because it's
too disgusting," Wolff said. "The jobs they were offered were inferior
to what they had before or so insecure that it made their family life
impossible.
They went back to school, went into the illegal economy or began to
live off their friends, relatives and neighbors."
"The quality of the jobs, the security, the benefits and the impact on
physical and mental health have been cascading downward as the wages
remain stagnant," he went on. "We're not in a recovery. We're in an
ongoing decline, which, by the way, is why Mr. Trump got elected. This
is happening to capitalism in Western Europe, Japan and the United
States. This is why an angry working class is looking for ways to
express and change its circumstances."
"Society has a responsibility to itself," Wolff said. "If the private
sector can't or won't manage that, then the public sector has to step
in. It's what [Franklin] Roosevelt said when he came on the radio: 'If
there are millions of Americans who ask for nothing other than a job,
and the private sector can't provide it, then it's up to me. Who else
is going to do it?' If we cut back on welfare we are making people
depend on the private sector. What happens to people thrown on a
private capital sector that cannot and will not function in a socially
acceptable way?"
"Instead of creating a middle class, it polarizes everything," he said
of the inequality. "It allows the top executives to go completely
crazy with their pay packages. They are paid beyond what's reasonable,
beyond what their fellow capitalists receive in other parts of the
world. There is a collapse of the ability to buy things. A company
that saves all this money through a tax cut from Mr. Trump is not
going to spend its money hiring people, buying machines, producing
more. They're having trouble selling what they already produce.
They're impoverishing the very people they sell to.
What do they do with the money? They take it and pay themselves. They
give themselves higher pay packages. They buy back their own stock,
which they're legally allowed to do. It pushes the price of the stock
up. Their [personal] compensation is connected to how well the price
of the stock does. No jobs are created. No growth is created. The
price of stock is going up even though the viability of the
enterprise-because of the [company's] collapsing market-is shrinking."
"Capitalism is hollowing itself out," he said. "The capitalists refuse
to face this because they are making money, for a while. That's the
same logic as the monarchs before the French Revolution building the
fantastic Versailles without understanding they were digging their own
graves in those lovely gardens."
The elites divert attention from their pillage by blaming foreign
countries such as China or undocumented workers for the economic
demise of the working class.
"It's a classic ploy of crooked politicians stuck with a problem of
their own making, blaming somebody else," Wolff said. "We take the
poor 10 or 11 million immigrants in this country with questionable
legal status and we demonize them. We scapegoat them. They couldn't
possibly account for the difficulties in this economy. Throwing them
out does not fundamentally change the dynamics of the economy. It's
childishly easy to show this. But it's good theater. 'I am smiting the
foreigner.' "
"Tariffs are another way to smite the foreigner," Wolff went on. "The
tariff is a punishment of others. These days, the bugaboo is China.
They are the bad ones. They are doing this. I'd like to remind people
two or three things about these tariffs. One: Historically, they don't
work very well. It's very easy to evade. For example, we put a tariff
on steel from China. What do the Chinese do? They cut a deal with the
Canadians or the Mexicans or the Koreans or the Europeans. Sell it to
them, who resell it here. It's on the same ship coming here. It just
has a different flag at the back. This is childish. It's well known."
"Number two: It's political theater," he said. "It doesn't change very
much.
For example, a good half of the goods that come from China come from
subsidiaries of American corporations that went to China over the last
30 years to produce for the American market. You are smiting them by
closing off their market. They're going to be angry. They're going to
lose their investments. They're going to take corrective action. All
of this is negative for the American economy. It's bizarre."
"Finally, the Chinese, their politicians being not that different from
ours, will have to posture in return and retaliate," he said. "They're
already targeting our farm products. It is chaos. The United States,
when we were a young country, was accused by the British and the
Europeans of stealing their technology and intellectual property.
Never before has it been easier to communicate intellectual property
than it is today. The Chinese have been doing their share of this as
an up-and-coming economy. It's not new. It's not frightening. It's a
part of how capitalism works. To suddenly get people outraged as if
something special is going on, that's just dishonest."
There is no discussion in the corporate-controlled media of the
effects of our out-of-control corporate capitalism. Workers struggling
under massive debts, unable to pay for ever-rising health care and
other basic costs, trapped in low-wage jobs that make life one long
emergency, are rendered invisible by a media that entertains us with
court gossip from porn actresses and reality television stars and
focuses on celebrity culture. We ignore reality at our peril.
"We've given a free pass to a capitalist system because we've been
afraid to debate it," Wolff said. "When you give a free pass to any
institution, you create the conditions for it to rot right behind the
facade. That's what is happening."
Chris Hedges
